Kapr Code [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Lucie Králová
fiche film], taking part in the Burning Lights competition of year’s Visions du Réel (7-17 April), aims to reconstruct the life of controversial Czech composer and prominent communist Jan Kapr (1914-1988), a Stalin Award laureate who was later banned in socialist Czechoslovakia and erased from public memory. In it, director Lucie Králová starts a philharmonic dialogue with Kapr, by mixing newly composed opera songs (written by Jiří Adámek) with Kapr's never-before-shown private archive, revealing his humour, inner struggles and desire to leave a mark.

Speaking to Cineuropa, Lucie Králová said: “We faced the question of how to translate Kapr’s story into the medium of film while keeping its complexity, ambivalence and strength, and still reflect the unknown ‘holes’ or ‘blind spots’ in memory. Do we have a right to interpret a person's life, especially when there are so many contradictions? I am interested in reflexivity — to explore the very essence of memory, media and narration. We reconstructed Kapr’s story from the fragments of memory we found. Kapr actually re-created his story with us, as he is the author of 8mm footage, letters, music, but also his own life-story which we follow in the opera songs. In this way, Kapr composes his life thus co-creating this documentary.”

Kapr Code was produced by Andrea Shaffer for Mindset Pictures (Czech Republic) and Martin Řezníček for DOCUfilm Praha (Czech Republic) in co-production with Zuzana Piussi and Vít Janeček for VIRUSfilm (Slovakia) and Helena Uldrichová for Czech Television. International sales are being handled by Switzerland’s Lightdox.

Check out our exclusive trailer below: